The growth of wireless networking has generated commercial and research interest in statistical methods to track people and things. Inside stores, hospitals, warehouses, and factories, where Global Positioning System devices generally do not work, Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) aim to provide location estimates for wireless devices such as laptop computers, handheld devices, and electronic badges. The proliferation of “Wi-Fi” (IEEE 802.11b) wireless internet access in cafes, college campuses, airports, hotels, and homes has generated particular interest in indoor positioning systems that utilize physical attributes of Wi-Fi signals. Typical applications include tracking equipment and personnel in hospitals, providing location-specific information in supermarkets, museums, and libraries, and location-based access control.
In a standard Wi-Fi implementation, one or more access points serve end-users. Wi-Fi location estimation can employ one or more of several physical attributes of the medium, such as received signal strength (RSS) from the access points, the angle of arrival of the signal, and the time difference of arrival. A number of techniques have been proposed or suggested that use RSS for location estimation in wireless networks. See, for example, P. Bahl et al., “RADAR: An In-Building RF-Based User Location and Tracking System,” Proc. of IEEE Infocom 2000, Tel Aviv, Israel (March, 2000); or T. Roos et al., “A Statistical Modeling Approach to Location Estimation,” IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 1, 59-69 (2002).
In a laboratory setting, RSS decays linearly with log distance and a simple triangulation using RSS from three access points can uniquely identify a location in a two-dimensional space. In practice, however, physical characteristics of a building, such as walls, elevators, and furniture, as well as human activity, add significant noise to RSS measurements. Consequently, statistical approaches to location estimation prevail.
Supervised learning techniques are typically employed in statistical approaches to location estimation. The training data comprise vectors of signal strengths, one for each of a collection of known locations. The dimension of each vector equals the number of access points. The corresponding location could be one-dimensional (e.g., location on a long airport corridor), two-dimensional (e.g., location on one floor of a museum), or three-dimensional (e.g., location within a multi-story office building).
Two types of location estimation systems exist. In a client-based deployment, the client measures the signal strengths as seen by it from various access points. The client uses this information to locate itself. The cost to an enterprise for such deployments is the cost of profiling the site, building the model, and maintaining the model. In an infrastructure-based deployment, the administrator deploys so-called sniffing devices that monitor the signal strength from clients. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/776,058, filed Feb. 11, 2004 and entitled “Estimating the Location of Inexpensive Wireless Terminals by Using Signal Strength Measurements,” incorporated by reference herein, discloses a system for estimating the location of wireless terminals using such sniffing devices. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/776,588, filed Feb. 11, 2004 and entitled “Estimating the Location of Wireless Terminals In A Multistory Environment,” incorporated by reference herein, discloses a system for estimating the location of wireless terminals on multiple floors.
The cost to enterprises in such deployments is the typically modest cost of deploying the necessary hardware and software, and the time and effort to build and maintain the model (if it is not completely automated). Collecting the location data is labor intensive, requiring physical distance measurements with respect to a reference object, such as a wall. Furthermore, even in normal office environments, changing environmental, building, and occupancy conditions can affect signal propagation and require repeated data gathering to maintain predictive accuracy. The model building phase then learns a predictive model that maps signal strength vectors to locations. A number of supervised learning methods have been applied to this problem, including nearest neighbor methods, support vector machines, and assorted probabilistic techniques.
A need therefore exists for improved location estimation techniques that can provide accurate location estimates without location information in the training data. A further need therefore exists for location estimation techniques that do not require profiling.